My first campaign of Pathfinder was under a DM of the "smash and bash" school of roleplaying. Everything revolved around the next target, and I decided to roll up a bard. He died from some unnamed mage tossing a fireball in a closet after me. Then had a random mercenary use a full round to coup de grace my dying form. That one combat killed off all the remaining original characters to the campaign, leaving only the new player to run off and find another party.

In a decade long d&d 3.5 campaign with players at around level 23, one of their encounters were 2 ancient red dragons. The PCs attacked their lair (fully buffed and expecting to fight 2 ancient reds) and they overwhelmed them with all their buffs etc., which made the players themselves shiver because it was so easy...

...they shat their pants IRL when they killed the dragons and they transformed into ice and began melting away right after their death. The dragons they fought were just buffed-up simulacrums. Then, when they were exhausted, they were attacked by the real dragons who watched their battle tactics, abilities etc. while casting every single long duration buff in the game on themselves. Well, one might think that disjunction makes the whole "buffing before combat" thing useless, but you enjoy their benefits before the opponent casts a level 9 spell, which really turns the tide.

The PCs won, after one of the longest and most epic battles in our history. It was cruel of me, but it was fair, because they knew they were against 2 powerful red dragons and still decided to go there, and I never play dragons as simple lizards who just claw claw bite. They knew my dragons would never be simple, but they were kinda speechless at the simulacrum trick :D

Ok we meet up pmuch the big boss of the Campaign (that arc anyway) named The Clown an extremely prolific and sadistic assassin

We decide to take his fortress by splitting up I being the rouge would go alone disabling guards and defenses including the main gate

Moment of badass and really good rolls I hanglide over the fortress and drop down Drop assassinating the guard using the momentum i slide down the wet root on his body the corpse a projectile taking out two more a few more disabled guards only to find the gate was already smashed through and my party was inside

we regroup later and enter the bosses lair the sadistic fuck has been toying with us from the beginning of our adventure popping in and out of the plot at whim usually leaving minions for us to fight and nearly get curbstomped by every time.

So he does his speech while he fights playing on our characters darkest secrets.

Our Priest is immediately shut down as the DM playing The Clown describes in excruciating detail how she killed her parents bashing their skulls (in her defense they were bastards but that's a moot point) me and the warrior charge him and the ranger (or was he a druid) goes to help the priest

The Clown continues rattling off our secrets my rouge is mostly immune to this (i was rolling really really good) the warrior faltes once or twice and this gives The Clown openings to murder his hit points and without a tank i'm screwed

we got him pretty low but one attack will murder the rest of us without a healer or buffs druid does some back up healing and we retreat back

I want to remind you how screwed we were the warrior is stabilized saved by the DM being nice and having The Clown attack us instead The Pristess is out of this fight because roleplay reasons (the player was cool with it tho) I'm a glass cannon tat relys on stealth rather then dex to avoid being instakilled i survived one hit by pure luck rolling minimum damage

Dm declairs Rocks fall The Clown Dies as soon as he advances under his skylight the dm places 4 more figures around The Clown Assassins from my Guild the DM describes them impaling them on their katanas

The Dm Saved us he had story reasons for doing so but The Clown would of kicked our asses

Well, I thought mermen are basically stronger than humans, as a baseline?
And stats are the baseline, kind of. Just that higher-level characters (or in some systems, just later-game), they just tend to USE those stats more or better.
In 3.5, a high-level character has similar stats as he did at the start (maybe a little higher, due to 4th's and items), but the class abilities and feats makes you use them much better ^^.

Yeah, I think ktccd is onto something. Um... Spoiler warnings if you're like a friend of mine and only watching the series as it is subtitled. =P

I'm not a D&D player, but just using conventional game practices, right now the Fishmen are the "boss encounter" of the East Blue. We'll get to the point where they are less and less rare, and eventually where they'll have access to better equipment and techniques than we see at this point (Haki, Energy Steroids, etc.).

I think I'M the killer DM.... it's not on purpose i just can;t get the encounter levels right. my first encounter of the game was meant to be a cinematic-type thing where bandits knock you out. A guy died and refused to retcon it (it was my first campaign) the second guy died to a pack of wolves i'd set up.... because he wandered a couple of miles off for no real reason and heard strange noises in a barn. then the party chewed up a carrion crawler like it was nothing, so i threw two at them and found out it doesn;t QUITE work like that.... with a few exceptions it went downhill from there. a RUST monster nearly killed them.... and they were level 5. just recently i joke about getting the encounters right and was banned from making the game.

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